The doctrine of intervention under the red flag was originally formulated in an article by Sergey Kovalev published in Pravda in September 1968 under the title “Sovereignty and international obligations of socialist states.” In the canonical version, Leonid Brezhnev described it personally in his speech at the Fifth Congress of the Polish United Workers’ Party in November 1968.
And it stipulated that “when internal and external forces hostile to socialism try to turn the development of some socialist countries back to capitalism, it becomes a problem not only for a given country, but a common problem and concern of all socialist countries”.
The doctrine became the justification (ex post) for the intervention of the Warsaw Pact countries (in a political sense, everyone except Romania, which refused to participate) in Czechoslovakia in August 1968. Over 400,000 soldiers took part in the operation “Danube” as well as 6,300 tanks, 800 aircraft. And it was undoubtedly a demonstration of the Pact’s organizational efficiency. But in a political sense, it was the opposite of finesse.
There would be no Brezhnev doctrine without the so-called Stalin doctrine, formulated back in 1945 to make people aware of the consequences of the Yalta division. Namely, Stalin made it clear that whoever occupies the territory introduces their own social system there. One imposes its system wherever its army goes. And in fact that is what happened in the post War period, with a few exceptions, such as in the case of Austria. The part of it, which was occupied by the Soviets, was too small to build socialism there.
And Soviet interventions took place before the Brezhnev doctrine appeared. The doctrine was already operational well before the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia.
On the night of October 18-19, 1956, the Soviet troops left their bases and set out on Polish roads to Warsaw in order to forcibly prevent an undesirable development of events at the top echelons of the Polish United Workers’ Party. Khrushchev, however, accepted the inevitability of the Polish October changes and the Soviet troops returned to their barracks. There was no armed confrontation.
The first intervention during the formal Warsaw Pact existence, and the bloodiest one, took place in Hungary in October and November 1956. The Imre Nagy government announced Hungary’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact on November 1, but in fact the decision to conduct a bloody onslaught on the protesters was made in the Kremlin a day earlier (this could have been influenced by the information on the planned declaration of neutrality provided to Mikoyan in Budapest). The five Soviet divisions already located in Hungary were strengthened by 12 divisions that were brought in from outside. And a brutal suppression of the Hungarian uprising was carried out. Khrushchev did not involve the armed forces of other countries, but personally informed the leaders of the Warsaw Pact (Gomułka was the first to learn about it at a meeting in Brest) about the intervention taking place on November 1-3, and even to President Tito. More than 2,000 Hungarian patriots died. When one criticizes Orban’s supporters that his pro-Putin policy is insulting the memory of these victims today, one can hear explanations that, after all, Khrushchev was a Ukrainian and the national backbone of the forces intervening in 1956 were Ukrainians. So if there is a grudge, it is not against the Russians (and Putin) but against Ukrainians. This explanation is as perfidious as it is false.
Operation “Danube” began on August 20, 1968. The combat units of the USSR, Poland (25,000 soldiers) and Hungary entered Czechoslovakia. The intervention HQ operated in Legnica. Experienced by the Hungarian lesson, the Soviets did not want to take solely the odium of intervention. They forced an allied action. Over 100 Czechs and Slovaks lost their lives.
The purges that affected the bureaucratic apparatus of Czechoslovakia after the intervention had an impact on the state of Czechoslovak diplomacy. Even at the end of the 1980s, there were many dumb doctrinaires at the ambassadorial levels in the service. Professionally, they made the worst possible impression. When there was a change of power after the Velvet Revolution, the Czechs had to rely on outsiders, or draw victims of purges from non-existence, such as in the case of a diplomat, who in 1990 became an ambassador for negotiations on conventional disarmament and confidence-building measures in Vienna after many years of exile in the archives of the Czechoslovak Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Pulled out suddenly from the silence of the archives, he looked dazed for a long time, but he managed bravely.
The archive has become an instrument of personnel policy not only in the Czech Republic. Also in Poland and in recent times. In the last 25 years, several former directors general, several former directors, and several former ambassadors were “sent” to the archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland for completely non-substantive reasons. Each (with a few exceptions) political team used this measure, although in 2005-2007 and from 2015 it was used with particular pleasure. At the end of July 2021, a dozen or so people were assigned to work in the archives at the same time. Overnight, without asking the interested parties, without agreeing with the heads of organizational units in which they worked, without preparing appropriate working conditions for them. The “exiles” had one thing in common: they were all MGIMO graduates. As one expert on the history of Polish diplomacy stated, it was the first case of collective harassment that took place at the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs since 1968. Then what disqualified a person was “inappropriate” ethnicity in the family tree, today it is a diploma from an “inappropriate” university. And then and today what is behind the harassment is the suspicion of the so-called disloyalty to the Polish state. It is hard to believe in this expert’s thesis. But more about it later.
Poland was supposed to become the next victim of Brezhnev’s doctrine in the years 1980-1981. Plans for military intervention were then prepared in Moscow. Scheduled at the beginning of December 1980, the “Soyuz-80” manoeuvres were to take place partly on Polish territory, but without the participation of Polish military units. This was an unambiguously general repetition before the entry of the Warsaw Pact troops to suppress “Solidarity”, just like the “Šumava” exercises were a preparation for the “Danube” operation in 1968. Fifteen Soviet divisions, two Czech and one East Germany, were to enter. They could be strengthened over time by four Polish divisions. The intervention options were used to carry out the “Soyuz-81” exercises (in March and April 1981), and in September 1981 the Soviet army staged unprecedented in terms of scale “Zapad-81” manoeuvres. Soviet reconnaissance groups in civilian clothes carried out on-site visits at strategic facilities (radio and television headquarters, the building of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party, state administration facilities, etc.). The imposition of martial law by internal forces made the intervention superfluous. And it was more than real and so unpredictable in its consequences that, it seems, not only the West, but also the decision-makers in the Kremlin breathed a sigh of relief. And Wojciech Jaruzelski was awarded the Order of Lenin.
After the process of decolonization, proletarian internationalism received a new edition in the form of aid to developing countries with a socialist orientation. This was the doctrinal justification for Cuba’s military aid to Angola or Mozambique, as well as political and not only support for the regime in Ethiopia. The problem arose when the change of power in these countries meant abandoning the socialist orientation. One could observe it passively, as in Tanzania, for example, because there the main support came from China anyway. But where the Soviet Union gave its support, such a historical reverse undermined the credibility of the officially proclaimed theory. Military interventions by the USSR in the area of the “Third World”, apart from obvious geopolitical goals, also had an undoubtedly ideological lining. And they took the foreign policy of the USSR into a dead end. The grave for Soviet imperial ambitions was dug in Afghanistan. From December 1979, for the next ten years, Soviet troops stuck in Afghanistan (reaching a maximum of 120,000), engaging considerable financial resources (although they constituted only 2.5% of the military budget) and human resources (over 15,000 soldiers died), thus weakening the international position of the USSR, certainly even more than the authority of the United States was undermined by the intervention in Vietnam. The Warsaw Pact countries were not formally involved in the Afghanistan intervention. Political solidarity was required of them, and at the end of the 1980s even a symbolic aid commitment. Afghanistan has confirmed its fame as the graveyard of empires.
That was the end of Brezhnev’s doctrine. An attempt to reactivate it after June 4, 1989 was made by Nicolae Ceausescu. In August 1989, he sent a letter to Gorbachev (and separately to other leaders of the Warsaw Treaty) in which he demanded that “urgent measures” be taken to prevent the “liquidation of socialism” in Poland. The Soviet response came swiftly and suggested that the issue of socialism in Poland should be left in the hands of “Polish comrades.”
Undoubtedly, geopolitics was behind the doctrine. But its disguise in ideological robes stiffened it. It made it cynical and pushed it into a dead end.
And as soon as it became invalid, and Poland was the test of it in 1989, both the socialist system and the “family of socialist states” collapsed.
